Endangered Dreams

The Great Depression in California

Kevin Starr

In Endangered Dreams, Kevin Starr paints a portrait that is both detailed and panoramic, offering a vivid look at the personalities and events that shaped a decade of explosive tension. He begins with the rise of radicalism on the Pacific Coast, which erupted when the Great Depression swept over California in the 1930s. Starr captures the triumphs and tumult of the great agricultural strikes in the Imperial Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, Stockton, and Salinas, identifying the crucial role played by Communist organizers. The highpoint of social conflict, however, was 1934, the year of the coastwide maritime strike, and here Starr's narrative talents are at their best, as he brings to life the astonishing general strike that took control of San Francisco. And yet, the Depression also brought out the finest in Californians: state Democrats fought for a local New Deal; California natives helped care for more than a million impoverished migrants through public and private programs; artists movingly documented the impact of the Depression; and an unprecedented program of public works (capped by the Golden Gate Bridge) made the California we know today possible. In capturing the powerful forces that swept the state during the 1930s, Starr weaves an insightful analysis into his narrative fabric. Out of a shattered decade of economic and social dislocation, he constructs a coherent whole and a mirror for understanding our own time.

Endangered Dreams

The Great Depression in California

Kevin Starr

Description

California, Wallace Stegner observed, is like the rest of the United States, only more so. Indeed, the Golden State has always seemed to be a place where the hopes and fears of the American dream have been played out in a bigger and bolder way. And no one has done more to capture this epic story than Kevin Starr, in his acclaimed series of gripping social and cultural histories. Now Starr carries his account into the 1930s, when the political extremes that threatened so much of the Depression-ravaged world--fascism and communism--loomed large across the California landscape. In Endangered Dreams, Starr paints a portrait that is both detailed and panoramic, offering a vivid look at the personalities and events that shaped a decade of explosive tension. He begins with the rise of radicalism on the Pacific Coast, which erupted when the Great Depression swept over California in the 1930s. Starr captures the triumphs and tumult of the great agricultural strikes in the Imperial Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, Stockton, and Salinas, identifying the crucial role played by Communist organizers; he also shows how, after some successes, the Communists disbanded their unions on direct orders of the Comintern in 1935. The highpoint of social conflict, however, was 1934, the year of the coastwide maritime strike, and here Starr's narrative talents are at their best, as he brings to life the astonishing general strike that took control of San Francisco, where workers led by charismatic longshoreman Harry Bridges mounted the barricades to stand off National Guardsmen. That same year socialist Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for governor, and he launched his dramatic End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign. In the end, however, these challenges galvanized the Right in a corporate, legal, and vigilante counterattack that crushed both organized labor and Sinclair. And yet, the Depression also brought out the finest in Californians: state Democrats fought for a local New Deal; California natives helped care for more than a million impoverished migrants through public and private programs; artists movingly documented the impact of the Depression; and an unprecedented program of public works (capped by the Golden Gate Bridge) made the California we know today possible. In capturing the powerful forces that swept the state during the 1930s--radicalism, repression, construction, and artistic expression--Starr weaves an insightful analysis into his narrative fabric. Out of a shattered decade of economic and social dislocation, he constructs a coherent whole and a mirror for understanding our own time.

Endangered Dreams

The Great Depression in California

Kevin Starr

Author Information

Kevin Starr is State Librarian of California, contributing editor of the Los Angeles Times, and a member of the faculty at the University of Southern California. He is the author of a number of books, including Americans and the California Dream, Inventing the Dream, and Material Dreams. He lives in San Francisco.

Endangered Dreams

The Great Depression in California

Kevin Starr

Reviews and Awards

"The defining portrait of a state in which the bravery, cowardice, nobility, and greed of hard times mixed in a brew of unmatched power."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A master of the deft character sketch, Starr brings his protagonists to life, complete with their strenghts and eccentricities, in a few short strokes."--The Washington Post Book World

"Mr. Starr...depicts in colorful prose and vivid detail the political conflicts and physical transformations that engulfed California during the Great Depression."--The New York Times Book Review

"A vibrant, engrossing chronicle."--Publishers Weekly

"Endangered Dreams' legacy is to awaken in us an awareness of the terrible battles fought in places we might now live in or drive through, and to make us realize that even today the passions nourished by the Depression sleep uneasily in our unstable state."--LA Weekly

"The best of the series...Endangered Dreams is narrative history in the grand tradition...In California, most of the themes of the Great Depression were writ large and Starr makes the most of them, seizing the threads of history with such whole-souled fervor that you can almost see him sweating gleefully as he spins them into an elaborate tapestry of the familiar and the unfamiliar...The triumph of narration and understanding that Starr has given us in the[se] crowded, surpassingly lively pages is the defining portrait of a state in which the bravery, cowardice, nobility, and greed of hard times mixed in a brew of unmatched power."--T.H. Watkins, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The mix of sound scholarship and contemporary literary expression creates a fascinatingly readable picture of the Golden State in the 1930s. Highly recommended."--Library Journal

"A first-rate, vivid, verbal diorama of the varied events that formed and reformed California during the convulsive decade before WWII...Complete with anecdotal particulars and big-picture perspectives, a stunningly effective chronicle of a vanguard state's coming of age."--Kirkus Reviews

"Kevin Starr continues his brilliant California saga in this fact-filled book, almost impossible to put down. Starr has the uncanny ability to characterize historical events by phrases that inform and amuse while he literally bombards the reader with congent detail. His exposition of the clash of left and right in the depression decade in California aids the reader in understanding conditions elsewhere in America and provides an important basis for understanding California today."--I. Michael Heyman, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and Chancellor Emeritus, University of California at Berkeley

"Kevin Starr is the unrivalled master fot he cultural history of California. Endangered Dreams is a stunning continuation of his chronicle. No one who wants to understand California today can afford to miss his account of the social and political battles of the turbulent thirties."--John T. Noonan, Jr., United States Circuit Judge

"As I read the first three volumes of his California history I wondered how Kevin Starr would handle the bitter, hilarious, monumental social tides of the Depression years that did so much to shape America's most populous state. He hasn't let us down."--Neil Morgan, Associate Editor, San Diego Union-Tribune, author of Westward Tilt, and co-author of Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel

"This book is a fascinating interdisciplinary social history. A war and peace story of 1930s California by one of the West's outstanding historians."--William H. Goetsmann, The University of Texas at Austin

"In this often painfully vivid re-creation of the 1930s Great Depression in California, Starr displays his knowledge of every event, his willingness to set forth unequivocal (wonderfully insightful) opinions, and his command of every conceivable source, from obscure government reports to intimate letters. Like an exuberant storyteller, Starr uses vivid details and enlivening quotations to take us into the midst of a riot, to listen to heroes and villains and people whom other historians have overlooked or never heard of. It is a simple fact, proven volume by volume: no one gives California history such vitality and relevance as Kevin Starr."--J. S. Holliday, Director Emeritus, California Historical Society and author of The World Rushed In

"Starr has presented an historical panorama dramatically highlighting an era of major change and ocnsequences that stil affects the lives of Californians."--Abraham Hoffman, The Los Angeles Corral